Three truths + 1 lie. Part 4. The time I almost died at a Ricky Martin CD signing in Paris

Livin La Vida En Rose

Three truths and a lie. CONTINUED.

1. I once appeared on a Canadian game show and lost the top prize because I couldn’t remember Rupert Grint’s name.

2. I worked as a weed wacker for two summers while I was in university and wacked up dog 💩 in my face (and mouth) more than once.

3. I met Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

4. I almost died being crushed to death by a rush of screaming teenage girls at a Ricky Martin CD signing in Paris.

I’ll wait.

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4. TRUTH

There are a couple things in my adolescence that stand out to me as particularly horrifying. Like, when I got my braces off for the first time and thought my teeth looked like massive Chiclets. Or when I had my hair cut like Winona Ryder’s in “Aliens” and it took me two years to grow it out.

Or that time when I almost died at Ricky Martin CD signing in Paris.

Not in Paris obviously but it’s a photo I can use

It was the summer of 1999, or, rather, the summer of Livin La Vida Loca. You couldn’t escape that horn-heavy song, not even in France. Ricky Martin’s hit song was the theme track of my summer. I was sixteen years old and studying French in Paris for the month of July.

Going to Paris was my first trip across the Atlantic, and the first time I had been on an airplane without family supervision. The four-week program was an advanced course to complete grade 13 French (the highest level for high school in Canada at the time). I’d dragged one of my best friends to go to the info session with me and my mom, and we basically signed up on the spot.

Yes, I know — this all sounds very fancy. Of course it does — it’s France. Everything sounds frilly and chic once you mention France.

But it wasn’t fancy. At all. We were staying at a one-star hotel that wasn’t even in Paris! It was located in the outskirts called Aubervilliers, which I liken to Queens, but sketchier, a suburb north east of the city.

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

Needless to say the hotel was a dump. When my friend and I walked into our room, we were greeted with a stench worse than death. It was unliveable. So we were assigned another room but it was on the opposite wing of everyone else. There was also no shower but a bathtub in the middle of the bathroom.

Top it off and we were a group of 20+ teenagers who were free from the grips of their parents for the first time. Teenagers are crazy and gross and dramatic already on their home turf. Put them halfway across the globe, and it was basically Animal House. Nights consisted of drinking wine or vodka out of paper bags while watching “les pompiers” in the fire hall across the street as entertainment. What started as a friendly wave between a student and one handsome French fireman window-to-window soon escalated into more waving, then dancing, then full out strip teasing for a group of sixteen year old girls.

I was definitely out of my element. I was growing out the aforementioned Winona Ryder pixie cut, including trying to manage insufferable sweaty bangs in the humid Paris weather, and was battling a love/hate relationship with my body. That, and I felt like the other students in the program were in on something that I didn’t know. They all seemed to possess this “je ne sais pas” quality that other kids seem to “get” faster than others. Maybe it was their ease with sex and booze or maybe it was their overall acceptance of what it meant to be an adolescent — something I struggled with because I was always waiting for high school to be over so my life could finally start.

So I didn’t drink. I didn’t have sex. I didn’t break any rules.

Me on the Eiffel Tower before they made it safer.

A couple weeks after we arrived word got around that Ricky Martin was in town to do a signing at a record store in Paris. Some of the girls in our class had already decided they were skipping class that day to see him. My friend — who was as innocent as I was — asked me if I wanted to go. Skip class? For Ricky Martin?

Here’s the thing. Sure, I thought Ricky Martin was hot but he wasn’t really my jam (I’d like to think my teenage self maybe always sort of knew he was gay). I could care less if I ever met him or heard “Shake Your Bon Bon” ever again (especially the latter). But “Livin La Vida Loca” had pulled a string in my teenage heart since it was the song my crush, Luke, and I had danced to at prom.

I mean, kind of sort of danced to?

At the end of the school year, my friend (the same one in Paris) and I somehow scored free tickets to that year’s senior prom. In hindsight it’s pretty laughable that, of all the teenage girls, we were picked to go to prom because of the no drinking, no sex part. If we are to use American teen movies as any indicator of what happens at prom (or maybe allow them to influence behaviour and expectations) it’s all about drinking and having sex (and my prom, a year later, would be no exception with at least three girls getting pregnant on prom night). But anyway, we just danced. When “Livin La Vida Loca” came on, the hit song of the year, we continued to dance our hearts out. It was then when Luke came up behind us, took both of us by the hand and started getting loco with it. It was the first time we had any physical contact and it DID something to me.

My friend, who very much wanted to go to this Ricky Martin CD signing even though, up until this point hadn’t previously mentioned any sort of liking for Ricky Martin whatsoever, used this instance as leverage.

“It’s yours and Luke’s song” is what she said — even though we both technically danced to it with him. She conveniently (and smartly) left out this part. I don’t know why I said “oui” but I did.

The next day we skipped class and took the metro to downtown Paris. When we arrived to the record store, the outside was packed with young girls and their mothers. I mean, PACKED. I had never seen a crowd like that anywhere except for maybe a Blue Jays baseball game or Christmastime at our local mall. You know, times where it actually made sense to have that many people at one location. There were posters and cardboard signs reading, “J’aime Ricky” and it seemed everyone was wearing a Ricky t-shirt. These women read the assignment (and would probably be devastated years later when they learned they never stood a chance).

Apparently Ricky was already in the store signing CDs to only a select few VIPS but we would hang outside with these horny women to catch a glimpse of him. I thought it was stupid. Signing a CD or maybe a piece of clothing that I didn’t care to wear or wash again was one thing. Standing in a crowd of this many people to *maybe* see a shot of his immaculate profile? I wanted to leave just as soon as we arrived.

My friend convinced me to go with her to the back of the record store. She figured he wouldn’t go through the front doors but probably at the rear entrance. I guess she had watched enough Entertainment Tonight to know the drill? I don’t know how she knew this back when we barely used the Internet other than to AskJeeves something. Within minutes, a white limo drove up — far enough not to see who it was, but close enough to see it was a man wearing sunglasses and tight white trousers. Definitely Ricky! Or was it?

We honestly couldn’t tell. My friend said something about it being a decoy and I honestly didn’t know how she knew these things. Suddenly we heard screaming and girls chanting, “Ricky! Ricky!” but with a French accent, so not such a harsh R and more emphasis on the “ky” part of his name.

Anyway, for some reason we scrambled back to the front of the record store and as we did, the crowd started to close in on the front doors. My friend and I got separated, and I somehow was pushed by the massive crowd to the front as if they were a strong ocean wave and I was a bobbing volleyball going up and up and up. I was flung to the front, against one of the steel barriers, and all at once the wave of girls came thrashing on top of me. I thought I was going to die.

As the girls continued to push my body against the steel barrier, using my body as a human pyramid, I remember thinking: “My parents are going to learn I died…in Paris…at a Ricky Martin CD signing.” I didn’t know what was worst. Them finding out I skipped class for it or my dad saying, “That Bon Bon guy? She died for him?!”

I shuddered at what the obituary might look like. “Brianne Hogan: she lived la vida loca once and look what happened to her!”

Suddenly I heard a male voice cry, “Do you want help?” and I looked up to see a tall, long-haired American man. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up and flung me across his shoulder and out of harm’s way. As he put me down, my friend popped magically up and asked me where I had been.

“I nearly died by a stampede of Ricky Martin fans. You?”

She didn’t bat an eyelash. “At the back of the store! That guy wasn’t a decoy, Brianne! He was the real Ricky Martin!” I couldn’t help but notice she was more disappointed that we hadn’t stuck around to ask him for his autograph than she was at my near-death experience.

We took the metro home, back to our dank hotel.

I had broken the rules for the first time in my life, and had nearly died for it. But I didn’t regret it. Back then I think I thought I was on this predestined timeline, a bystander of circumstance in so many ways, not fully realizing I was the driver of my own life (which, in my defence, at 16 years old, I had just gotten my learner’s permit). I thought I could bypass a lot of life’s challenges or hangups by playing safe and doing what felt right to me, but that doesn’t leave room for much expansion (or even great stories). Sometimes we have to do the opposite of what we would normally do to discover who really are or what’s worth changing for. That way we can find new sensations and new kicks in the candlelight (has anyone really listened to the lyrics of that song?! I can’t be the only one who didn’t fully get it as a teen!).

I soon understood that’s what high school is supposed to be for and used Paris as my springboard into doing things a little differently.

There, I drank alcohol for the first time (after much trepidation my friend and I bought a bottle of Bailey’s, which seems fitting since I’ve always felt like a middle-aged woman who stays home to read her glossies); I flirted awkwardly with an American college man who bought me coffee at a cafe on Les Champs Élysées (“you could have had SEX with him, you know,” my friend would say later) and I learned to enjoy and appreciate watching “les pompiers” shake their bon bon at us.

And I passed French with an A.

Brianne in Paris was different. But the same.